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The Mediterranean diet is very similar to the UK Government’s healthy eating advice and following it can help you achieve a healthy, balanced diet. The diet is also known to lower your risk of heart disease, strokes, Alzheimer’s, type two diabetes, Parkinson’s and other health concerns. On top of that, a new study has found that the Mediterranean diet can also help you to destress. Express.co.uk reveals how the Mediterranean diet can prevent stress.
What is the Mediterranean diet?
The Mediterranean diet incorporates typical meal plans from the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea – France, Greece, Italy and Spain.
While the traditional meals vary from country to country, they do have a few things in common.
In general, the Mediterranean diet is high in fruit and vegetables, legumes, nuts, beans, cereals, grains, fish and unsaturated fats.
If you want to switch to a Mediterranean diet, you’ll need to cut down on meat and dairy.
In the Mediterranean diet you can eat lots of bread and pasta.
READ MORE- The best diet plan to help you live longer and avoid diabetes
Does the Mediterranean diet help you lose weight?
Alongside exercise, the Mediterranean diet can help you lose weight.
The diet is not about counting calories, it’s about filling up on healthy foods.
The diet focuses on plant foods, fruits and vegetables, healthy fats, and whole grains, but can include poultry, seafood, eggs and dairy in moderation
When following the Mediterranean diet, you end up eating less processed and sugary foods and red meat.
This means you are cutting out high-calorie foods without realising.
How the Mediterranean diet can prevent stress
Stress has a negative impact on your personal life and increases the risk of chronic conditions such as heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.
Stress is also associated with higher mortality rates, so it is important to reduce your stress levels.
One way to decrease stress is to switch to a Mediterranean diet.
A new study conducted by researchers at Wake Forest School of Medicine, part of Wake Forest Baptist Health in North Carolina, America, has found that a Mediterranean diet can lessen the physiological effects of stress and promote healthy ageing.
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Carol A. Shively, Ph.D., professor of pathology and comparative medicine at Wake Forest School of Medicine and principal investigator of the study recognises that it is very difficult to control stress.
To eliminate stress, you normally have to identify the cause and work to eliminate it.
Where this is not possible, it can be very difficult to control the horrible symptoms such as a faster heartbeat, sweating, anxiety, and fear.
The researchers wanted to find out if changing your diet can beat stress.
Shivley said: “Unfortunately, Americans consume a diet rich in animal protein and saturated fat, salt and sugar, so we wanted to find out if that diet worsened the body’s response to stress compared to a Mediterranean diet, in which much of the protein and fat come from plant sources.”
The researchers studied the effects of chronic stress for half an hour in 38 middle-age animals.
These animals were fed either a Mediterranean or Western diet.
The Western group was given protein and fat primarily from animal sources and the Mediterranean group was given protein and fat primarily from plant sources.
The researchers measured changes in the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems and in the adrenal gland hormone cortisol, to see how the diets affected their stress levels.
All of these systems are involved in regulating stress and nerves.
The animals fed a Mediterranean diet exhibited enhanced stress resilience because they had a lower sympathetic nervous system and cortisol response to stress.
This means their bodies were more able to return to a calmer state after the ‘fight or flight’ response was triggered.
Shivley said: “Our study showed that the Mediterranean diet shifted the balance toward the parasympathetic nervous system, which is good for health.
“By contrast, the Western diet increased the sympathetic response to stress, which is like having the panic button on all the time – and that isn’t healthy.”
She concluded: “A population-wide adoption of a Mediterranean-like diet may provide a relatively simple and cost-effective intervention to reduce the negative impact of psychological stress on health and delay nervous system aging.”
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